ECOVACS GOAT A2000 LiDAR Pro review – robot lawn mowing : advanced

Robot lawn mowers have come a long way in a very short amount of time and I think it’s weird that we don’t reflect sometimes on the journey that technology makes. In the case of robot lawn mowers I’ve got to tell you the ECOVACS GOAT A2000 LiDAR Pro has demonstrated to me that very simple fact: we’ve come a long way. 

EFTM Snapshot: I’m still convinced that a robot lawnmower is the best thing you can do for the health and look of your lawn. Because we’ve come so far, this is a fantastic option. Its mowing capabilities are exceptional and it’s very easy to set up. The edge trimming is a huge bonus but I do think it depends on how good your yard is or how well structured it’s laid out as to how good a result you’ll actually get. 

A short history of robot lawnmowers

If you’re new to this whole world, I got to tell ya it’s a game changer. It’s been nearly 10 years since I installed my first robot lawn mower at our house.

That first one seemed like a chore just to get set up. You literally needed to lay a wire around the entire boundary of your lawn and secure that into your lawn with pegs, which the lawn would eventually grow over. The wire was never visible but that wire was how the mower knew where it was.

Like with with robot vacuums in the early days, these early robot mowers just moved around your yard constantly, bouncing around randomly and erratically. Over time they would mow every square inch and they did a great job.

Fast forward a few years and we started to see models that didn’t need a boundary wire. Maybe they could detect grass using a camera. We saw models that would actually run paths back and forth the same way you would mow in straight lines, lane after lane. The lawn was mowed beautifully.

We saw GPS used to track and understand the location of your lawn and the edges. All those technologies have kind of brought us to where we are today. The use of cameras, LIDAR, and a whole range of sensors to make setting up a robot mower easy and to make the quality of the robot mowing outcome pretty sensational. 

Goat Grows up

When ECOVACS first got into this game, it was no real surprise they make amazing robot vacuums. They know robotics. ECOVACS is a robotics company not a robot vacuum company so I guess the move to the outdoors was logical.

The first GOAT, called the ECOVACS GOAT G1, was different to anything I’d seen before. It was a big beast, had a different style to it, used a camera on top, but it also used these kind of strange beacon poles that you would put at different corners or places throughout your yard. You only needed two. I needed three because I had an L-shaped yard but that would use those beacons to determine where it was. That was how it located itself in your yard critically. Also you would remote control the GOAT G1 around the edge of your lawn to actually map your property.

The GOAT A2000 is a huge step forward for ECOVACS in this space and to be honest I’ve been using the original GOAT G1 until this new GOAT arrived. The lawns looked great. It just never did the edges so every few weeks I get the whipper snipper out and do those edges. Now with the GOAT A2000 in part that job’s also covered because the GOAT A2000 from ECOVACS features a line trimmer on the left-hand edge that, in theory, will trim right to the edge, whether it’s a brick wall or fence or just the boundary of your lawn. 

Setting up the Ecovacs Goat A2000

The setup process for the new ECOVACS GOAT A2000 was actually remarkably similar to the GOAT G1. Really out of the box very simple to set up. You just need power, no beacons required here, so it is literally just power and pairing the new GOAT with your Wi-Fi network and your phone’s Bluetooth.

From there it’s a remote control lawnmower. You drive the ECOVACS GOAT A2000 around the edge of your lawn using your mobile phone as the controller, walking slowly along with it. It’s got some pace when it’s in direct forward mode. It motors along but when turning and twisting it’s a much slower process.

Overall a very simple process and from there there’s a lot of little intricate things you can do in the app, like determining the mowing direction, which way you want the lines to go essentially, as well as schedules and things like that. 

One thing you’ll notice in the app, though, is the regular map, which has been the case with the Ecovacs Goat before this. Because this device, the A2000, uses LiDAR to help it with its navigation, you now have a LiDAR-created 3D map of your yard. I got to tell you, it’s amazing to see. You can look around this 3D map and actually see a brilliant rendering of your backyard in great detail, because LiDAR is the best way to reproduce a scene, an area, or a thing. It gives you real context for how well this robot is able to know its surroundings.

How well does it mow?

Now I want to preface this by saying it’s the middle of winter. I’ve been using the ECOVACS GOAT A2000 across the month of July. Let’s be clear: my lawn isn’t growing fast. Come summer we’ll revisit this, comparing the ECOVACS GOAT A2000 to many other robot mowers which are hitting the market in Australia over these coming months.

What I’ve noticed most importantly is it’s doing a great job. The lawn is constantly mowed. It’s constantly trimmed. The one thing I think people probably don’t understand is that this isn’t a big blade on the bottom of this like you would get on a traditional lawnmower. There are literally three little razor blades that spin and articulate underneath this device that trim the lawn. It’s not actually a robot lawnmower. It’s a robot lawn trimmer because if you send it out every day or three, it’s just trimming the top of the grass. What’s most important is that it’s always trimming the top of the weeds too so the weeds never take hold in your lawn. I think that’s the healthiest thing that I’ve ever done for my lawn.

One key advantage of the Ecovacs Goat A2000 over many other robot mowers and Ecovacs’ own original Goat G1 is the dual-blade disc. Underneath the mower are two discs, each with their own blades. You’re getting a wider cut and therefore fewer passes are required. The extra power, the extra amount of cutting that comes from those blades, I think, gives you far better performance as well.

Let me be clear: I’m not a greenskeeper. My lawn is not perfect. It’s not beautiful but it’s better today than it was when I was this sole responsible individual for that lawn. If I missed a week, let it go too long, let the weeds come up, that was a negative impact on my lawn. Now the GOAT, or George as we’ve called this one, replacing Gary, our old G1, is out there every couple of days trimming the lawns, doing his job, getting it done. Now it’s also doing one more thing: the edges. 

Edge trimming with the Ecovacs Goat A2000

Edge trimming on the ECOVACS GOAT A2000, to me, feels very similar to a lot of the mopping innovations that occurred in robot vacuums. I don’t know if I’m proud to say that I’ve used a lot of robot vacuums over many, many years and I’ve seen the evolution of that technology. Every time we got a new solution to mopping as an example on the robot vacuum, it was excellent but now, looking back, I see how perhaps they weren’t as great as you might have thought at the time.

Fact is I think the edge trimming on the ECOVACS GOAT A2000 is exactly the same. It’s an unbelievable advance in robot mowers but I think we can do better.

First and foremost I think I should cover here the fact that my lawn is strange. I have a brick fence with a neighbour, I have a pathway up to my Hills Hoist washing line, I have a bricked barbecue area, and worst of all I have this sloping narrow backyard that slopes down to what should be maybe a garden bed. It’s a rock retaining wall with uneven rocks at that. Frankly it’s not a square simple lawn so actually getting to the edges is a bit of a challenge. In the end I had to mark off areas of the map to do that to ensure that the GOAT avoided those areas because it was coming unstuck too often on the sloped edge near a rock wall. Too many times we had to recover the GOAT and put it back into the grass.

Along the clear and distinct edges it’s having great success at trimming those longer bits of grass that it’s not mowing on a regular basis. Is it the same as me getting out there with the whipper snipper? No. Is it close? Not quite.

If I had a distinctly squared-edged, bounded lawn I think this would be a great solution and you’d probably only use your line trimmer on a much more irregular basis. For me we’re still a little way off with this technology. Little things like on a square corner the trimmer’s not getting out far enough to actually get into the very corner when the GOAT makes the turn.

Probably not an issue for most people but whenever I got close to it to try and take a little video, for safety reasons it would shut off the edge trimmer. That’s fine, I get it, it’s detected a person within 1.5 meters it turns off the edge trimmer but can we maybe get it to stop driving? What happens is it keeps driving with the edge trimmer off so it actually misses a spot. Little things like that I think can be improved over time. 

The Ecovacs App

As someone who’s used many robot vacuums from ECOVACS and, of course, the original GOAT, I’m well aware of the ins and outs of the ECOVACS app. It is a great app to use with their products.

It’s actually not the app that I’ve got any issues with here. I just think it’s the simple things, like setting that no-go zone for the edge of my lawn.

I’m talking about a slightly sloped edge of the lawn down onto a garden bed on a rock wall. This is not an easy place for the GOAT to drive but it’s grassed. I wanted to map it originally and then I wanted to draw a line and say, “Don’t go there anymore,” because I realized it couldn’t cope with it in the day-to-day mowing of the lawn. Unfortunately I couldn’t just draw a line like a virtual boundary you can do in robot vacuum apps. I had to drive the GOAT over there and drive it into the no-go zone. I had to drive it into its least favorable driving conditions and then tell it, “This is where I don’t want you ever to go again.” They need to be able to set it so that we can just draw on the map and say yes and no to these areas.

Other than that the app is outstanding. I’m a big fan and I love the way it keeps me informed and how easy it is to use for anyone, whether you’re experienced or otherwise. 

Not our last review

As I said before though, we’re in the middle of winter. I can’t really tell how much those edges have grown and how much it’s getting or missing at this point. While I know the edge trimming isn’t as good as it could be, it may be far better than I think. Once we get into summer and we’ve got some real growth happening from the lawn, I’ll know very quickly what it looks like in certain areas. I know certain areas that it will just not do well, especially those edges where it can’t drive and I’ll need to do. I think along some of the fences it’s going to do a great job. That will play into who this is for and who can rely on it as an edge trimmer. For other people the traditional GOAT or the sibling GOAT, which is recently released and doesn’t have an edge trimmer, might be the perfect solution. We will revisit this robot mower and others during the summer months when the lawn really jumps up. 

Should I buy a Robot lawn mower

I’m not going to lie. I love doing the lawns. I love getting the mower out. I love mowing the lawns. I love doing the edges. It’s kind of my time. I listen to music. Hopefully it’s a lovely day and yeah it all just works out nicely.

I’m not reliable enough to mow the lawns to perfectionecovacs-goat-a2000-lidar-pro-review. That’s where a robot lawnmower comes in. The consistency of continuously trimming your lawns, sending a mower out every few days, isn’t just about showing off that you’ve got a robot. It’s about getting a better lawn. It actually produces a better-looking lawn. I think it’s because the weeds never come up but I also think the grass is healthier because it’s trimmed consistently at a set height.

It’s obviously not cheap. You’re paying thousands of dollars for a device that doesn’t really pay itself back because unless you’re paying someone to mow your lawns, you’re not actually saving any money. The time you get back to stand and look in awe of a robot that’s out there doing the job that you once did is valuable in itself. 

Web: Ecovacs